


Legend Has It

by Merixcil



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Before the Awakening - Greg Rucka
Genre: Character Study, Child Abandonment, Chosen One, Fairytale Tropes, Gen, Loneliness, Parallels, Retelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 12:11:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12557108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: In this universe, stories begin in the desert





	Legend Has It

Imagine opening your eyes upon the world to find yourself treading in the footsteps of giants. Unwittingly so, of course, but with such fervour. After all this time. The familiar beats of legend falling with such damning precision that you had forgotten the stories aren’t supposed to apply to you.

This story begins in a desert. In this universe, stories always begin in the desert, where our protagonists learn thirst before they learn how to walk. They are not happy beginnings, it’s impossible to look back on them fondly. Leave the rose tinted glasses for the core planets, out here on the edge of space, you have to learn to live with what you’ve got or die.

Let’s start on Jakku, with a girl who is entirely too small to be on her own, yet on her own she is. Unkar Plutt breathes down her neck and does his best to claim ownership of her, but this little girl is quick to rage and quicker to run. Seven years old and she is already treading her way through the veins of destiny. Quite literally, she takes for her home a hollowed out AT-AT, far enough out from Niima Outpost that the great frog can’t reach her.

There is so much more hidden in that great desert. There are Star Destroyers and TIE fighters, great Corellian freighters with their innards ripped out and replaced with blaster turrets, and Coruscant tourist shuttles brought in as cannon fodder. And this little girl, darting through the ripped out carcasses of their engines, doesn’t think to ask where they came from. To her, this is just what Jakku is. One great spaceship graveyard, without rhyme or reason. She finds the helmet of a pilot called Dosmit Ræh and imagines that she was the last warrior from a great civilisation lost below the sands.

“Rey!” Unkar Plutt snaps at her when she arrives in Niima Outpost one morning, no longer so small that she can expect to have people take pity on her hunger and not yet strong enough to fight for her food. She collapses at his feet, sobbing, begging for sustenance. Aged ten years old, the sand sticks in her lungs and settles there, siphoning away moisture that she doesn’t have to spare. She will never quite shift it entirely; Rey will always be thirsty.

She doesn’t know about slaves and moisture farmers and a planet sitting far, far away across the cosmos where other legends began. But then again, Rey has yet to realise she is a legend. She won’t work it out till it’s staring her in the face.

But in the meantime, this story is slow to start. Unkar Plutt looks down on this little bag of bones barely strong enough to beg for mercy, and grins. “There’ll be more later, if you bring me something good,” he laughs, throwing a quarter portion and half-filled canteen in her general direction.

He laughs because he is so short sighted as to think Rey will not take what she is given and make a life from it. Unkar Plutt sees this girl and assumes she will stumble and fall and come crawling back. And once she’s put herself between his claws, that’s when he’ll really have her.

If only someone had taught Unkar Plutt about deserts and legends and the true value of thirst. If only he knew that the craving for water will see a Stormtrooper on his knees amongst the animals, spine curling of its own accord after so long under someone else’s thumb. That’s all to come, of course, but the point stands. Thirst will lower you, and once you have been lowered, the only place you can go is up.

Rey sits on the crest of the great dune, looking down towards the town. She watches the sun set. Just one sun, of course. One sun for one legend. The sons of Tattooine are something else entirely.

She doesn’t let herself be discouraged by the fires that surround Niima Outpost by night, thick with the promise of human contact. She craves it. She doesn’t need it. Rey wraps the bandages at her arms more tightly against the sudden chill sweeping over Jakku as the desert steals heat as well as water with the gathering night. She rips her eyes away from the dying embers of all the friends she’ll never have and turns them skywards, soaks up the stars. If she squints, she can just about see what the old folk mean when they talk about the Skywalker – the great figure of a man with three stars at his belt picked out in spots of light across the heavens.

They swear blind they’ve never heard of a Jedi who went by that name. They don’t listen to Lor San Tekka.

“Luke Skywalker looked Darth Vader in the eye and offered him mercy,” Tekka tells the gaggles of children who flock to his feet every time he steps foot in Niima Outpost. “The Light side is always a choice.”

The first threads of the legend are beginning to come together. Rey’s fingers tighten over the handle of her quarterstaff when the other scavengers look too long in her direction. She has the operating system of an old Y wing tucked into the back of her AT-AT. The sun beats down and thirst gnaws at the back of her throat but she does not give in. She can count the people who have offered her mercy on one hand, Lor San Tekka isn’t one of them.

“Who are you waiting for?” he asks her, before she can explain that she’s waiting.

And here Rey has to hesitate. She knows what she’s waiting for, she knows what she wants. She has waited for so long that sometimes she forgets that she waits. Waiting is like breathing to her, like air dragging the sand ever deeper into her lungs. “My family.”

The other children ask Tekka about the ships that pockmark their horizons, and he tells them about a great battle fought over the empty blue sky. Rey finds that story harder to believe than the tales of Jedi and the Force. Jakku is not important enough to herald the end of empires.

Tattooine is not important enough to herald the end of empires either, or their uprising. But Rey has never even heard that particular little desert rock’s name. She doesn’t know about a boy who waited for freedom, or a boy who waited for the universe. She’s just a girl, waiting for her birth right to fall into her hands.

Tekka watches her out of the corner of his eye, as she loads up her speeder without a word. “I once heard tell of a man who was prepared to wait all his life in the desert. Destiny found him.”

Rey doesn’t have time for destiny. Not as she zips back across the sand to the promise of tasteless bread and the company of a computer. She’s learnt the beeps and screeches that make up the language of machines, the language of legends. In another lifetime, a boy is pulling a bolt from an old R2 unit and unlocking the universe, a boy is free to build a protocol droid from scraps. It’s all much of a muchness.

On the table sits a dried up spinebarrel, no longer green, and a doll she’s too old to play with. She eats her portion without fuss, scratches another line on the wall, wears the helmet she hides under her bed just because she can. She will survive here, even if they have to wash all the green from her soul. Endurance may not be living, but it’s something, and in the meantime there are flight simulators to distract her. They promise new horizons, a wide open Galaxy, but Rey isn’t interested. She has forgotten she is waiting, she can no more stop that than breathing.

So she doesn’t stop. She wakes up every morning and drags herself out of bed, she doesn’t eat because there is never anything left over after she has staved off hunger the night before. Her only intention is to get out of the heat before it becomes unbearable, zipping across the sand fast enough that the wraps around her face flap in the current she leaves in her wake. Sometimes Rey allows herself to make believe that this is another flight simulation, taking her high over the atmosphere of Naboo or Hosnian Prime or any of those planets that sound like fairy tales to her. This poor child looks around the desert and doesn’t realise that stories don’t come from the lap of luxury, they start here, they are already happening to her.

And perhaps, on occasion, even after she is too old to play with dolls and the green has been drained out of her and the helmet rests idle under her bed for days on end, perhaps sometimes Rey imagines the sound of a second, third, fourth engine riding alongside her. She has no idea who would want to ride with her – the scavenger who greets people with the blunt end of a quarterstaff. So the figures of her mind’s eye have faces that remind her of Ivano Troade and Mashra, or they wear a helmet to obscure the face of Dosmit Ræh. The beauty of the vision is so absolute that Rey has to squash it almost instantly, before the dry depths of her throat seize up around the ever mounting sand.

Instead, Rey screams profanity at the men Unkar Plutt sends to keep the other scavengers off her back. She knows better than to raise her weapon to them, but she won’t take this charity lying down. Plutt doesn’t want her to thrive, he wants her in debt, and Rey has already had the green sucked out of her, there is nothing left to give.

All the same, debt is the currency of the Galaxy. The Hutts built an empire out of it, one that sprawled itself across the outer rim, unconcerned with the inner workings of politics and peacekeeping. Out here they are the only law, a law that boils down to those who owe the most. The more you owe, the more you must repay. The more you must repay, the wealthier you are. Rey carefully has nothing, to have nothing is to escape debt by the skin of your teeth, she’s seen what Niima does to wealthy men.

Niima the Hutt rules over Rey’s small corner of the Galaxy. For Luke it was Jabba, Anakin had Gardulla. What is it about Hutts and the desert? Perhaps they know that all the stories start here. Perhaps they are lying in wait. Perhaps they simply understand that whoever controls the spice controls the universe, and that spice can only be mined from the bellies of great worms hidden in the sand. But that’s another story for another time. It belongs in part to Han Solo, who took off one day and never really landed.

Niima the Hutt, Niima Outpost. Rey’s dealings with the great gangster slug are mercifully few, but the name hangs over her all the same. It hangs over everyone who dares eke out a living amidst the Starship Graveyard. It hangs too hard over Lor San Tekka, who makes his final visit to the half-town one scorching afternoon when she is fourteen.

“Still waiting?” he smiles. Rey can’t say how she knows, but she knows he only says it to get a rise out of her. He is so kind and careful with most everyone he meets, but for her he has nothing but bright anticipation, too quick and direct to allow him to pity her.

She doesn’t want his pity. Rey collapses in the shade of Unkar Plutt’s shack and pulls out one hand to count all the people who have ever shown her mercy.

“Ivano Troade, Mashra, Tacchul, Gungok. Unkar Plutt doesn’t count.”

“What don’t I count for?” The Blobfish roars from his cave.

Nothing. He counts for nothing. Rey walks steadily back to her speeder, thinking about the day Ivano Troade taught her how to open up an X-Wing control panel to find the rare coper wiring hidden behind the programming boards. She thinks of Teng Mallar passing her almost empty canteens when she was small and the pickings were rough. She thinks of Mashra lending her a rope as they scaled the hollow skull of a Star Destroyer, and telling her to keep it. She thinks of Tacchul and Gungok regaling her with stories of Chewbacca the warrior-pirate, Shyriiwook echoing around Niima Outpost’s pathetic excuse for a spaceport and making it sound like it could be just about anywhere else in the Galaxy.

These are the fragmented, insubstantial acts of kindness that write hope into Rey’s soul against her better judgement. She tries to squash it, does she ever try. When the Wookies leave, she is already back at her AT-AT, pretending it’s not going to hurt to roll into town the next day and find it quiet. Their ship leaves a plume of smoke against a darkening sky, so thick that it blocks out the stars, painting a strip of black across the heavens.

She doesn’t see the Skywalker that night, but she feels him, growing in her bones. Luke Skywalker has a knack for stumbling into the lives of those who wait in the desert, bringing with him new hope. It burns under Rey’s skin, hot and shameful. She kicks at the sand, closes her mouth tight and makes sure not to breathe in any more of it than she already has. 

From under the displaced desert, the green head of a spinebarrel stares up at her accusingly. How dare she awaken its slumber? Rey screams in frustration as she carefully digs the flower out of its home.  She places it on the table, next to the dried out husk of a flower that is no longer green, and boots up the Y-Wing computer in Shyriiwook. Tonight she will pretend Chewbacca is sharing the desert with her, and she will put on her helmet and marvel at how well it fits her, and that will count for something.

Anakin hated sand, Luke hated the desert. Rey hates loneliness, though she will never let herself admit it. Perhaps that’s why, when Unkar Plutt with his leering eyes and lecherous smile, offers her a job, she takes it. Her arms smothered in ship-grease as she pokes around in the belly of a flyer so old the serial number is no longer visible on its prow. Her fingers slip through the gaps in its worn out engine, fast and clever after ten years navigating the bodies of its fallen cousins.

Like a crow, she picks over carcasses that larger predators have abandoned. Like a crow, she picks out patterns. Like a crow, it would be so easy for her to fly away, but why fly when you can walk?

“That one’s garbage,” Unkar Plutt snaps when Rey asks why he doesn’t just use the YT-1300 freighter sitting idle in the spaceport. He tells her the ship is ninety years old, that it should have fallen apart decades ago.

Yet he keeps it. Rey forgets about the ship in her scramble to fix the flyer and see Unkar Plutt and his men out of town, if she had held it in her mind’s eye for just a little longer, she might have found its place amongst a story two Wookies once told her.

When she finds the clogged turbo speeder, she recognises the problem from an A9 Interceptor she found two years ago, its hull cracked open and its guts spilled on the sand. When Unkar Plutt points her in the direction of a rundown airspeeder from which he expects her to build the second turbo, she can’t be sure if it’s the one she found out in the Goazon Badlands or the one that had been entombed in the sands of Namenthe’s Crater. Everything the Blobfish has seems to be built on her labour. Rey bites back the urge to tell her that he owes her – she would hate to leave him rich in debt.

Unkar Plutt leaves Niima Outpost with six of his thugs. He is gone for ten days – ten days in which Rey is free to scavenge without fear that someone might try to protect her to gain her trust, ten days in which she doesn’t see the way the hideous old fuck looks at her.

Ten days during which she must live off the portions she earned fixing the flyer. With Unkar Plutt gone, the currency of food and water breaks down, and Niima Outpost is best avoided for anything but the most desperate of circumstances. On the fifth day, Rey caves; hops back on her speeder and rolls into town. She hands out portions to every child too young to dig through the belly of a Star Destroyer – she knows what it is to be small and hungry – and takes a long drink of water from the tap outside the spaceport.

When Unkar Plutt returns, he is two men down. Rey doesn’t want to know what happened to the people now missing, some corners of the Galaxy are better left unexplored.

“I hated them,” she tells her computer, “but they didn’t have to die.”

The computer is old, dying in that way technology loves to die. Bit by bit, a little worse every day, till two weeks later it will simply refuse to turn back on and no manner of tech savvy can fix it. Rey doesn’t know that people are supposed to stutter to a similar kind of halt. On Jakku, people leave and never come back and if they’re not dead they might as well be.

Rey is sure she will watch the whole planet leave her behind before she is allowed to stop waiting. Waiting is like breathing, she sucks in a lungful of air and refuses to choke on sand.

The only corpses Rey has ever had to deal with are those of the two great Starfleets that fell out of orbit on this wretched world. When the computer from the Y-Wing becomes the first friend she’s ever watched slip through her fingers, she goes hunting for a replacement, sniffing back tears she swears blind are caused by allergy.

It does not do to mourn – tears are wasted water. But she finds her heart heavy with cloying, untapped emotion that has never had anywhere to turn but inward, and when Teng Mallar (the fifth finger, the thumb, the full hand) is ripped to shreds by steelpeckers in front of her eyes she does nothing but lie in bed and scream at the injustice of everything for two full days.

Two full days without work, two full days without payment. When Rey looks up from her grief she is thirstier than she’s ever been in her life. Thirsty and desperate. Desperate and thirsty.

The trouble with thirst is that it lowers you. You will struggle to earn back the water you lost, you will be tethered to its supply, you will become a slave to the ever present threat of dehydration. Rey rips into the body of her dead computer in search of vital organs, a beating heart to offer up to Unkar Plutt in place of her own. She finds nothing quite so grand, but the fractured scraps of something worthwhile are heavy in her hands as she approaches his stand.

“After a snack?” the Blobfish leers at her over the counter.

Rey shakes her head, “water.” The sand is so high in her throat, she wonders that it doesn’t pour out of her when she opens her mouth.

It’s the first and only time Rey will hand over a friend, though the flight simulator is just one of many dead bodies she will pick over in the name of survival. Practicality and reverence can live alongside each other, they fit neatly into the space between her finger tips as she runs her hand over the gun turrets of fighter craft and the bulging guts of decaying civilian transport. There are many ways to scavenge the ruinous planes of Jakku – you can take everything or you can take what you need.

Rey watches the masterboard of the Y-Wing computer vanish into the depths of Unkar Plutts great paws. He doesn’t know what he holds. The next time her ears are wrapping themselves around Ryl, Genosian, Shyriiwook, Binary, it will be when she’s looking their speakers in the eye.

The only languages Jakku could claim to be its own are Teedo which is useless beyond the dunes and Huttese and which Rey wishes she didn’t understand. She hears it rolling off the tongues of people who couldn’t be further from the worms if they tried, but like it or not it's the language of debt. She takes the canteen Unkar Plutt hands her and drinks deep, sets it down when empty, and looks him hard in the eye.

You owe me, you great frog, you great worm who’s not a worm. You owe me respect, you owe me dignity, you owe me a childhood Force damn it. You owe me the happiness I had when that little piece of metal you so ungraciously exchange for water could still show me what the surface of Alderaan used to look like. Did you know it was beautiful? Do you know that those people didn’t deserve to die? You are rich in debt Unkar Plutt and if Niima were still alive she would pronounce you the wealthiest man on all Jakku.

A lifetime spent minding herself, keeping her distance, stops the words from falling out of her like a sand slide, but it’s close. Rey turns tail, loads up her speeder and heads back out into the desert to marvel at the untold majesty these beasts cast over her insignificant little life. Their story began in ship yards on a core world filled with more green than Rey has ever seen. It’s been a long time since she found a living spinebarrel.

Without complaint, Rey surrounds herself with dead bodies. She hears the sighing of long stifled battle cries through the corridors of imperial ships and the groaning ghosts of rage in amongst the speedy ships of the resistance. They will never fly away from Jakku, they will ache and collapse and decay and she swears she will make herself watch. She has to understand what death looks like. If you don’t know why you are trying to survive, then what’s the point in trying?

Hidden in the sands are relics, more telling than fallen giants. The sandstorms that tear across Jakku uncover the past as often as they bury it, and Rey is always one of the first to look upon the newly formed landscape and its newly exposed treasures. The Gtroc 690 with its bed too soft for sleep, it’s bridge too shiny, too clean. She closes her eyes and hears the engines rising over her head, Devi’s wide, hopeful smile and Strunk’s cautious friendship. The months they spent working on that carcass amounted to nothing for her, for them that was the Galaxy encased in chrome. Luke would be so proud of them, Rey can’t say she blames them. Even when the nights draw in and she’s surviving day to day while they ride her imagined sustenance across the stars. It’s ok, she knows how to handle this storm.

Jakku storms can last for days, by the time they’ve blown themselves out she’s invariably ravenous.

On a day she doesn’t know is her eighteenth birthday, Rey pulls a parachute out of a dune. With it, comes an ejector seat from a TIE fighter. With the seat comes the body of an imperial pilot. A problem, a challenge – what will she do? Can she leave this long dead stranger to the mercy of time, or will she pillage their unmarked grave?

What do scavengers do? They take what is left over, they take the things that seem useless at first glance, they pick bones clean. Without mercy, without family, without friends, without owing the Galaxy a thing, Rey is a scavenger first and foremost. She riffles through the pockets of the TIE pilot, picks apart the seat for working parts. She takes the parachute for herself, the commlink and the sidearm for Unkar Plutt, and the helmet as an afterthought. It stares back at her without judgement, the black metal growing hot under the sun.

She doesn’t look at the pilot’s face. It’s enough to know that she doesn’t want a dune for a burial mound any time soon. Rey drags it up to the top of the dune, shovels aside as much sand as will stay shovelled and lays the poor soul to rest. She kicks the sand back, till the black of their uniform is no longer visible and the steelpeckers can’t get to them, then loads up her speeder and heads back into town.

In one hand she holds survival, in the other she holds respect. Balance is so very important.

Survival burns wild in her veins, though. It is the most important motivator, it is the reason she’s still standing. Rey steps into the engine turbines of the Inflictor and never suspects that it was put here by a captain who rejected her own survival in favour of The Cause. Ciena Ree crashed a whole Star Destroyer just to keep it out of the hands of the New Republic. Evil systems are still evil at their core, but the people within them have stories, as much potential as anyone else.

Ciena Ree ended her story in the desert, but then again, she wasn’t a hero. Rey’s story is ready to start, the same as any other day. When she wakes, she doesn’t know that she will only sleep in her own bed one more time, she will only scratch one more line into the wall. The dried out spinebarrels sitting on her table will stay dry, the doll she is too old to play with will be buried in the sand along with Dosmit Ræh’s helmet. She will lay her old life to rest without ever getting the chance to give it the burial it deserves. That’s survival.

Luke Skywalker didn’t know he’d be leaving on the day he came home to find his farm and family burnt to the ground. He took one look at the toppled towers of the vaporators he had tended all his life and turned away. He didn’t miss it, he never went back to that salted earth. When Luke returned to Tattooine it was for the sake of friends he was too close to losing and not the desert trying to drag him back under.

On the day Qui Gon Jinn won him in a test of reflex and daring, Anakin Skywalker must have known that he would not spend another night on that awful, heat soaked rock. Anakin had as much confidence in his abilities as his would be master, all he had to do was not lose. Imagine waking up, and for the first time in your life tasting freedom on the back of your tongue. A ten year old boy left his mother behind because he didn’t know any better, the grown man would have done the same to escape the rising sands.

Do you think Obi Wan Kenobi knew he would die the day Han Solo took his money? All his money, every last penny – the Jedi didn’t know what to do with all that green, he had forgotten the feel of Naboo’s forests and Coruscant’s urban jungle. By then the loneliness ran so deep he couldn't see the offer of a new lease of life before his eyes. When he climbed aboard the Millennium Falcon and removed himself from the last solid earth he would ever stand on, he didn’t do it for his own good.

Loneliness left Obi Wan Kenobi dull enough to leave, it keeps Rey sharp enough to stay, quick enough to keep her nose out of trouble. She accepts the quarter portion Unkar Plutt gives her with as little complaint as she can muster, jumps on her speeder and makes the journey back to her AT-AT for the final time.

Some languages she learned from the Y-Wing computer, others she learned out of necessity. Teedo is a language she has had branded across the backs of her eyelids. You want to survive out here, scavenger? Then you better be ready to fight for it, you better be ready to fight them.

Rey butts in, quarterstaff raised before she can think better of it. The little droid caught in the Teedo’s net yelps and squeals with such vigour that for a moment she forgets that Binary isn’t a language spoken by people of flesh and blood. As she steps in to jab at the luggabeast this Teedo rides, she doesn’t know that this world is lost to her.

The Teedo leaves, the droid stays. Against her better judgement. It leaves a line in the sand where it rolls. Finality. These are her first steps. It zips around Rey’s bedroom beeping and whirring, full of questions and observations and a profound impatience.

_My name’s BB8. I must find my master. I have places to be._

Rey scratches the final line on the wall. She doesn’t bother to count how many marks she has left behind. Her footprints in the desert are the only imprint of value she will ever leave on Jakku and when the next sand storm rolls around they will vanish all together. This planet will not remember Rey, she will not be their hero, she will owe them nothing.

BB8 sticks to her like a noisy shadow, she grits her teeth and tells herself she will be glad to be rid of it. Unkar Plutt offers her sixty portions for proprietary rights to the little orange droid and she says no.

Why would she say no?

Once upon a time, Rey handed over a friend in exchange for water. That was thirst, this is hunger, she will not let her dry throat get the best of her again. Just the previous day, high above her head, a pilot had refused to give up the friends he had flown into the line of fire for. Resilience can come from anywhere.

Remember that thirst will lower you, remember that a Stormtrooper will get down on his knees amongst the beasts to banish it. Remember. It’s happening, right now. Rey doesn’t see it, but she sees the Stormtrooper dashing through the market.

 _He stole that jacket!_ BB8 roars as loud as its little Binary voicebox will allow. _He stole it from my master!_

Rey has never had anything to fight for but herself. She never knew she could be so fierce. In a moment the Stormtrooper is on his back, blinking up at her like she will be his undoing.

Of course, she doesn’t know he’s a Stormtrooper. That’s all to come. The beauty of life is that it stretches out ahead of you until the bitter end – your memories are a line in the sand that will be blown apart by dust storms and fellow wanderers of the desert. The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.

The Stormtrooper. The man, the boy, whoever he is, blusters through excuses. Rey is impatient, she doesn’t know he’s still figuring himself out. Fourteen years alone will do that to you – she’s had plenty of time to think.

“Poe Dameron. That was his name, right?” he says to the droid. Looks it in the eye like one would a person and doesn’t apologise for it. He looks at Rey like she’s fire.

But Poe Dameron is dead (false) and this man boy Stormtrooper is with the resistance (false) and “Luke Skywalker? I thought he was a myth.” (True – Rey thinks Luke is the stuff of legends. True – he is. True – Luke Skywalker is a myth and he is hope and the fact that he is very, very real does not change that).

BB8 spots Stormtroopers in full armour flitting through the market. Her Stormtrooper grabs Rey's hand.

“What are you doing?”

“Come on!”

Rey has never had a hand to hold before, she has never needed one. She doesn’t like the way he drags her forward to trail in his wake like exhaust from the back of a ship. She feels a new kind of helpless. 

She will learn to love that helplessness, she will learn to give her heart over to other people. Rey’s loneliness rages at this intruder on her time, but the man’s hand stays clamped around hers. He takes it again, and again.

“Stop taking my hand!” she snaps. He drags her along anyway, as if she doesn’t know how to run.

In all her days picking them apart for food, Rey has never seen a TIE fighter in action. These are small ships, notoriously fast but nothing compared to the bombast and firepower of the rest of the imperial fleet. When she sees one rising through the baked blue skies behind her, for a moment all she can process is that it’s real. All of it. Once upon a time, ships flew over this planet in glorious battle, they set upon each other in hundreds. She will build her life on the ghosts of wars past.

Then it fires on them, and the blast sends all three – woman, man and droid – flying. Such a little thing, is a TIE fighter. She never wants to stand in the way of a Star Destroyer.

The man comes round in a daze, but his eyes are sharp when he looks into hers, “are you ok?”

This is a story of good and evil. This is a story of survival and respect. This is a story of the status quo and the counter culture. This story was forged in the heat of the desert. This story is about a girl looking into the eyes of a stranger, and seeing home.

“Yes,” she will not dignify her howling heart with an answer. She reaches out and drags this new friend into her life. “Come on!”

The YT-1300 freighter still flies, like a dream, like a flight simulator. Once upon a time a computer was her only friend, now she has a droid and a person at her back and she knows, as she drops down into the cockpit, running through the ignition sequence like someone is guiding her hands, she knows she will defend them with every ounce of vigour that can be conjured from her starved little body.

She loses the TIE fighters in the bowels of the inflictor – their fault. You shouldn’t follow rats into sewers, they know where to run. When the ship breaks atmo, ninety years old and still so very beautiful, so quick beneath the controls, she sucks in air and revels in the feel of open space beneath her feet.

Rey is grounded, built of common sense and wide open eyes. She will look upon the stars but she will not live amongst them. Han Solo set himself adrift the day he took flight from Corellia – Jakku is the first of many worlds she will call her home.

“I don’t know your name,” she says to this boy, this wonderful man with his eyes like the night sky swirling around stars and his smile like a freshly picked spinebarrel.

“Finn. What’s yours?”

Here she hesitates, for the briefest of moments. In Niima Outpost, everyone knew everyone, and if they didn’t it wouldn’t be long before Unkar Plutt introduced them. For the first time in her life, she can decide if she wants the person standing before her to know her by name.

She does. Stars above she does. “I’m Rey”. It feels like loneliness shattering in the palm of someone else’s hand.

Finn is less adept when it comes to fixing a spaceship than he is at firing a blaster. That should have been her first clue. Resistance fighters don’t get far with that kind of ignorance, but she’s less concerned with details than she is with survival.

“BB8 said the location of the resistance base is need to know. If I’m taking you there, I need to know,” she spits around gritted teeth and a busted gas line. She doesn’t pay any attention to the squabbling of man and droid – she doesn’t fully understand the difference. What matters is Finn nodding along when the shrieking little machine tells her to fly towards the Ileenium system.

She refuses to take them all the way there, “I’ve got to get back to Jakku.” She waits, she breathes, sand rushed up to meet her. Finn screams in frustration and she doesn’t blame him.

Somewhere out in the sand, the wind blows through an old AT-AT and dislodges fourteen years of dried up desert flowers. It rattles the bones of Ben and Beru Lars. It slams the door of a bedroom that Shmi Skywalker kept empty after her son left. The desert doesn’t vanish when heroes leave it, it continues on, with whatever life it had before stories so ungraciously decided to happen to it.

You can be dragged through this universe by the hand, or by a tractor beam. Your choice. Unfamiliar with any pair of hands except her own, Rey has no stomach for the magnets that grab hold of the ship.

“Can you unfix it?” Finn asks of the gas leak. And oh my, he’s smarter than he looks. The two of them reach for gas masks in the same breath and dive below the decks. This ship was built for hiding in, this ship was built for running away.

She can’t see the face of their hijackers when they step onto the bridge, but she recognises the relief in Han Solo’s voice when he informs the ship at large that “Chewie, we’re home.”

Tacchul and Gorok gave Rey Chewbacca because he was their story to give. He’s not her hero to recognise. Han Solo, on the other hand, is obvious. The hairs that must be split to separate scavenger from smuggler are thick enough, but he is legend, more believable than Luke Skywalker. There’s not an outer rim planet you can step on that his story has not touched, and nobody believes him a myth.

“Han Solo? The rebellion general?”

“No, the smuggler.”

“Wasn’t he a war hero?”

Even amongst the Stormtroopers, Han’s name was revered. And Chewbacca? He more or less matches up to the fleeting impressions Rey had been granted of him when she made play she shared her living quarters with the Wookie for a night.

There are rathtars, Guavian Death Gangs, Kanjiclub. Han does what he always does – talks till they realise he’s full of shit, then runs for his life. Eyes slide to the orange and white droid that has newly adopted the smuggler, the ball at play in a game of kings. All the Galaxy is hunting for a path forward, for whatever lies up ahead – it’s astonishing how many people think the future lies in Luke Skywalker’s hands. No one ever looked so hard for Obi Wan.

Bad feelings exist to be heeded. Rey feels them in tandem with Han, she has already offered up her heart to him, the possibility of disappointment. Once you let go of the chains that bind you, you will fall apart. Anakin didn’t know how to let go.

Rey blames the closing blast doors on good luck and the ship’s modifications on Unkar Plutt. That toad is still finding ways to fall further into her debt, she’ll make him a rich man yet.

“From inside the hangar? Is that possible?” she splutters as Han wires up the engine to kick them into hyperspace.

Han shrugs, “I never ask that question till after I’ve done it.”

Somewhere behind them, Chewbacca is screaming and Finn is doing his best not to get his arm ripped off. When the Millennium Falcon doesn’t make the jump like old times, Rey points to the compressor and Han growls in frustration when she’s proven right.

They blast into hyperspace. One bypassed compressor later and it’s time for explanations. “It’s true, all of it,” Han breathes, once they explain that BB8 is carrying data valuable enough to kill for. The droid is carrying them all on to Luke, to destiny. It’s not a journey that everyone makes it through alive.

Han Solo knows a thing or two about lying, he knows about looking a princess in the eye and trying not to be in love with her because he was not worth her heartbreak. His eyes run over Finn and he knows about lying to save your skin. He knows about looking into the eyes of a bright young thing holding her future in her hands for the very first time and deciding to tell her a kinder version of the truth.

“One boy, an apprentice…” the name Ben Organa doesn’t pass his lips. Let them keep their heroes a while longer, there will be time enough to discover that all humans are made with feet of clay.

The desert drained flowers of their green, then Jakku did the same to Rey. Takodana seems determined to put it all back into her. “I didn’t realise there was this much green in the whole Galaxy” she whispers as they decend between the growing-green mountains choked by the forest and the living-green waves that break across its oceans. This is not her home, but one day she might grow roots here. On the best of nights, the image of an island that shines bright in her dreams could have been lifted from this planet.

From the other side of the cockpit, Han graces her with his sympathy. He offers Rey a blaster pistol which she won’t take till she’s sure he didn’t hand over with the intent of having her hand it back with interest. He offers her a job and she turns him down flat. “Jakku,” she mumbles halfheartedly. He doesn’t believe her, but he doesn’t have a home world to compare to.

Han leads these two stragglers into a magic castle, and they stare at everything. Rey clicks through species in her head, matching language with form and function. She could speak to most anyone here, in their own language at that. Her tongue jitters with repressed conversation, so very desperate to talk yet so unaccustomed to trusting people. She doesn’t know the rules out here, she can’t recognise ill intent at a glance.

Maz Kanata has been alive long enough to hold every story in the Galaxy within her body. One look at Han Solo and she slips into the language of smugglers, “I assume you need something. Desperately. Let’s get to it.”

No one hesitates when the four of them walk through the doors of Maz’s castle. The Resistance are on the move and the First Order with them. The hunt for Luke Skywalker is a race against time that no one who is running is well placed to win, they have decided that to find Luke they must think like him, so they send in pilots and decorated war heroes and the people Leia Organa trusts and Force users but they miss the point. You must be all those things before you understand Luke Skywalker, but most importantly you must have the desert in your blood.

Rey is used to being hungry. All her adult life has been so motivated by her never ending quest for food that she has all but forgotten there are other reasons to live. There is so much green on Takodana that it seeps into the vegetables and the fruits and the breads and all manner of other things that Maz sets before them as she takes Han Solo to task for his fleet feet. First, Rey is cautious. She doesn’t like being handed things unless she knows the price.

“No price,” Maz winks at her before Rey can ask. That doesn’t seem possible, but no sooner have her teeth sunk through the sweet flesh of a fruit she doesn’t know the name of, doesn’t even recognise from Lor San Tekka’s stories, she has sunk her teeth into everything. She eats in tiny nibbles and great bites, she chews and she doesn’t, she swallows fast and washes everything down with water that tastes different from the water back on Jakku. Everything tastes foreign, and vibrant, often unpleasantly so to her unrefined pallet but she eats it all anyway, just to know that it’s there. She hadn’t known there was this much green in the whole Galaxy, she hadn’t known there was this much flavour.

Rey munches on. Maz and Han discuss the fate of the universe.

“Go home, Han.”

“Leia doesn’t want to see me.”

Closer now, blasting through hyperspace, a fight is brewing. The only fight, the Light side verses the Dark. That so few amongst the assembling masses can feel the Force is immaterial, they stand as pawns in the name of The Cause.

Finn tells them both that this is madness, there is no fight against the First Order that can be won.

“If you live long enough, you see the same eyes in different people,” Maz replies. ‘Long enough’ is a subjective term, stories always repeat themselves – in triads and in irony and in harmony, that’s what makes them stories. She knows you don’t have to live very long at all before the same themes remerge from this desert of meaning we call life, “I’m looking into the eyes of a man who wants to run.”

Regular patrons swear blind that Maz Kanata has eyes in the back of her head. Those eyes bore into Han Solo.

Perhaps if Maz had spared the time to look Rey in the eye, she might have seen the sprouting seeds of heroes dancing in her pupils. She might have looked at the hanging threads of coincidence and woven them into a solid narrative. Not that she would have done things any differently, but she might have known.

As things stand, Maz gets no such chance. She scares Finn off and Rey with him, then turns to Han and asks him to put the pieces together. She has always been more interested in characters than plot.

Finn scurries off to what he thinks could be his fortune. He asks for passage to the desert, at the edges of the Galaxy. He might have started his own story had he succeeded, but Rey refuses not to fight for what she has. She has him, she will fight to keep him, she doesn’t want him to go.

“I’m a Stormtrooper,” says the man who was lowered by thirst, says the man who couldn’t kill. Rey only knows the very beginnings of his story, falling from his lips at last, but she recognises the echoes of her own.

Rey looks into Finns eyes and sees home, she sees herself. They don’t know that there is a third child moving through their orbit, who was separated from his family and forced to fight. Number three does not deserve their pity, but to deny he is their brother is blindness. In the stories, everything happens in threes.

“I wasn’t going to kill for them, so I ran,” Finn tells her, like it justifies the fact that he’s still running, “come with me.”

But Rey is grounded, she doesn’t take flight so easily, “don’t go,” she counters. And Finn’s seen enough eyes that he knows she won’t leave this world for him.

That’s Finn’s story though, we are trying to tell Rey’s. The trouble with lives is that they overlap – to tell the tale of Rey we must dip into the tale of Finn, of Han Solo. Glimpses of the stories of Leia Organa, Poe Dameron, Kylo Ren, Maz Kanata are essential. And of course, you know about Anakin, Luke and Obi Wan, the great constants of an ever expanding universe of entropy and light.

Rey doesn’t want to cry. Even on Takodana, tears are wasted water, but as she walks away from Finn her cheeks are wet. This is a different loss from the Y-Wing computer that taught her how to fly and put words from half the Galaxy in her mouth; this is like watching a Wookie ship leave without her, painting the skies so dark that the Skywalker is no longer visible. It’s just familiar enough not to startle her, it’s foreign enough that for a moment she thinks the weeping child she hears is herself.

Her feet know better than her heart, they carry her down, down into the depth of the castle. The Force is an ocean, you know. The deeper you go, the higher the pressure. Most people crack.

She walks past doors, the crying of a child who is her and isn’t her ringing loud in her ears. Her own eyes are dry as she steps up to the gateway between her and her destiny. Rey tells herself she can’t feel it, ignorance is bliss, but whatever part of her can hear the humming of the Force down here taps into it, slips through the lock, and pushes open the door.

When the Force opens a door, it closes a window. From here on out there will be nowhere for that power to go, it exists within Rey and how she uses it is as much a matter of fate as choice.

There is a box, calling to her, screaming to be opened. She reaches out and far down the ages, Obi Wan Kenobi is reaching for the same box in his hut in the desert. Together, they open the lid and see the hilt of a sword resting within, they reach out to take it, and here the stories diverge.

For Obi Wan Kenobi, this is the beginning of the end of his life, the passing of the torch. He’s looking into the eyes of a boy who could be anything and hoping he is a better man than his father. He’s looking hope in the face and daring it to implode on him. He’s pressing a weapon into a pair of eager hands and promising Luke Skywalker the universe.

For Rey, she is taking her first steps, marking her place in the sand. The Force attempts to fill in the gaps with rushed sound and pictures – it forgets linearity and slips between the past and the future. First the breath of Darth Vader giving life to a city on a planet she has yet to visit. A planet made of gas, no ground to speak of, she will never make her home there. She falls through the burning ruins of Luke Skywalker’s legend, she watches the third child without heritage kill a man, she is standing on the baking sands of Jakku for the first time, screaming for a spaceship to wait for her even as she takes in her first lungful of sand.

She is running through the woods and there is something hidden in the dark. Its presence is absolute, twisting into the night that surrounds it till there is nowhere to hide. She turns a corner and a flash of red is the only glimpse she gets of the third child before she is falling back through the Force, back through time to land on the floor of Maz Kanata’s basement.

Maz is there, hovering at the edge of this story. “That lightsabre was Luke’s. And his fathers before him. And now it calls to you.”

“I have to get back to Jakku,” Rey snaps in defence. Perhaps if she wishes hard enough, that barren desert will open its mouth and call her back home, perhaps it will scream loud enough to drown out the roar of the Force, this great untapped ocean that is lapping at her feet.

But if anyone in the Galaxy knows about lines in the sand, it’s Maz Kanata. “The belonging you seek is not behind you, it is ahead.”

Rey has never had a future before. She runs.

Remember Alderaan. Remember it was beautiful. Remember that those people did not deserve to die. Now you must also remember Hosnian Prime, along with the rest of its system. The New Republic that went up in flames, the people who tried to forge something great from the ashes of an empire. Millions of voices cried out in terror, then across the Galaxy, silence fell.

On Starkiller Base, General Hux looked upon his work and smiled. Captain Phasma kept the troops in line, to avoid passing judgement on other people’s sins. Kylo Ren, like his grandfather before him, looked down on the power he stood upon and called it sacrilege, his fingers combing through the ashes of enemies he was man enough to look in the eye as their fires died.

On D’Qar, Admiral Akbar looked on as once again whole planets were purged from existence, for the crime of daring not to fall on the right side of the line. Leia Organa straightened her back and pretended she couldn’t feel the swelling masses of death amongst the stars, or the shadow of Alderaan bearing down on her through history, or the anger that would always run through her veins.

On Takodana, the growing-green trees and the living-green oceans stilled. Smugglers from across the universe looked up to see fire burning through the skies. Han Solo and Chewbacca remembered an asteroid field that wasn’t an asteroid field. Finn felt helpless knowing that he was not enough to turn the tides of war.

Some debts can never be repaid - we call them life debts. General Hux will be in the red for a billion life times, he will never make up for the things he has taken and the things he has destroyed. No bother, he doesn’t want redemption, he wants victory.

Rey barely notices the death of the Hosnian System. The laws of the New Republic were a long way off reaching Jakku, their death is not her downfall. She is running for her life through the forests of this green planet with an orange droid at her heels and a blaster at her hip and she will survive, of that much she has to be sure. She doesn’t know that Finn has already come back for her, and has picked up the lightsabre she will not wield, or that Chewbacca can take out ten Stormtroopers at a time with his bowcaster.

Didn’t I mention? The battle is upon us. The only fight, Light verses Dark. The X-Wings of the Resistance descend upon Takodana following behind the TIE fighters of the First Order. They intend to paint this place red. Rey’s feet fall heavy through the forest, too used to sand dunes falling out from under her feet.

In this universe, stories begin in the desert. With a great longing for something, heroes set off in search of their fortune and find something else entirely. But in our universe, dear reader, in our universe, stories begin in the woods. There are Big Bad Wolves and evil witches and fairies and wil o’wisps and death flowers and wrong turns and above all a profound curiosity lurking amongst the trees. This is another beginning, this is where the story gets interesting.

Rey is the first child, running for her life yet still blissfully unaware of the real danger. Finn is the second child, the boy with the sword, who is fighting the forces of darkness as we speak. Kylo Ren is the third child, the one who was led astray, Edmund feasting on Turkish delight and Persephone gorging herself on pomegranate seeds and the children blindly following the Pied Piper into the mountain.

There is a twisted presence moving through the woods, trying to suffocate her. Something Dark, something familiar and new. Rey rounds a corner and sees a flash of red and this time she doesn’t fall backwards into reality. Reality follows her, burning sword whirling through the air. The fractious torment of his soul unnerves her as he advances, eager to kill and eager to explore. You can be both the Big Bad Wolf and the lost child – you can value curiosity as highly as the taste of human flesh.

He has power she does not understand, power she does not want to understand. He has dived deep into the waters of the Force and learned how to breathe without air. The energy he drags up from the dark corners of his being freezes her in place, and there is no part of him she can see that’s real. He hides his face, his hands, his heart. He holds her still and for now she can't throw him off.

“So this is the girl I’ve heard so much about,” Kylo Ren hisses, his voice as abstracted as everything else. He can feel the connection between them, more profoundly than Rey can. He will always be better at seeing what makes the two of them the same. Through the Force, their minds slip easily into each other, but he can't drag her down. Rey is grounded, she will sink by herself or not at all.

And all the while, Finn fights his brothers on the shores of Maz’s castle. They call him traitor, and he doesn’t apologise. He can’t save them, this much he knows, he can only mow them down in the hope that one day he will have brothers who won’t ask him to choose between what is right and what is easy.

Perhaps Finn feels the moment the third child takes the first in his arms and carries her out of the woods. The three of them are bonded like that, after all. But he is the second child, right there in the middle. You know what they say about middle children – they always get overlooked. But it is certain that he sees them, Kylo Ren with Rey hanging limp in his arms as he carries her up the ramp and onto his ship.

Finn has lost a brotherhood before, he will not lose Rey as well. Sooner or later, he’ll be back for her. But this is not Finn’s story, this is Rey’s. Say goodbye to our wayward Stormtrooper for now but know he’ll be back. He will never leave anyone behind again.

The dream comes to Rey without mercy. There was never any mercy. The green has been drained from the ocean and the island and all that is left is pallid and pasty, rising up before her, closer than ever before. Whispers cut through the half dark around her, the closer she is the worse it gets, the pull, the calling. Phantom fingers stretch around the handle of a lightsabre and she doesn’t know if it’s her own hand or someone else’s that feels the hard metal. She doesn’t know if she’s flying or falling or walking; walking on the water out across the waves to her fate. The current wants to suck her under, it wants to bury her deep. It would be so easy to let it.

Rey’s eyes fly open and the island dissipates like so much smoke. There is no lightsabre in her hand, there are straps at her wrists holding her down. There is cold metal at her back and colder metal surrounding her. Four walls, these restraints, and hunkered down in the corner, is a monster.

Memory is tricky and deceitful, the Force offers up a fiery blaze from a vision and her eyes relay images of a black hulking mass tearing through the forest. He was never part of Lor San Tekka’s stories, but his name was whispered through Niima Outpost nonetheless. People spoke of a shadow striding out across the sun, blocking out the Skywalker – it was myth and it was legend and it was true all at once, a story worth weaving into the stars.

Kylo Ren. “You’re my guest,” he tells her. Then he calls her friends murderers, traitors and thieves.

The thief is Chewbacca (true: he used to steal toy guns from Ben Organa’s hands to the squealing child’s delight), the traitor is Han Solo (true: he chose the stars over family and left his son to the mercy of the Force), the murderer is Finn (true: he has killed his own brothers in the name of survival).

Rey knows none of this, she only hears contempt. She only hears the word ‘friends’. Friends are more than mercy, friends come back for you, even if you don’t think you’re worth coming back for.

“You still want to kill me?”

“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.”

What is a ‘creature’ to you? Is it something scary, with teeth and claws and a hideous visage to complete the picture? Is it bugs and beetles squirming through the undergrowth to your disgust? Is it human? Is it welcome? If you saw it on the street, would you recognise it?

Kylo Ren is not his mask, and he is his mask. He is the act and the act is him. He is human and so much more and so much less. It’s complicated, it’s so much easier to call him Evil and be done with it. He is Evil, completely and wilfully, but be done with it and you will make more monsters.

The mask comes off. It glints in the light, and in a flash Rey is back, standing in the sand looking down at the helmet of a TIE fighter pilot. She doesn't know this story, not the half of it, it didn’t start in a desert that she would be able to recognise. And instead of the mask she must now look at the face, see the eyes, the nose, the hair, the half familiar line of his jaw. All that Evil and he’s just a man.

In some versions of the story, Darth Vader was a man, in others he was a machine. In every version of the story, the mask stays on, save those last few moments Luke kept for himself.  

Here is what we must remember when we believe we are on the edge of triumph – fate has a way of handing us the thing we dread the most. Rey never dared hope for victory, she has never seen good and bad, only what lies before her. Kylo Ren expects to slip into her mind and take what he wants, he expects to find her weak and feeble like a scavenger should be, he expects to tear her open like he tore open the best pilot in the resistance and retreat without a scratch on him.

We fight ourselves. We find ourselves. Rey has always had to adapt to survive, she is stronger than she thinks. For a moment, Kylo Ren pushes forward into her mind, terrible and full of rage and like nothing she has ever had the misfortune to experience before. Then he softens, unwinds, hangs unbidden at the outer reaches of her consciousness where she has no choice but to touch him. He sees her loneliness, he sees the island, he sees a life lived without parents, a life tucked neatly behind the wraps of a mask to keep out the sand.

Kylo Ren looks into Rey’s mind and sees himself. Rey looks back into his (she has to, she needs to, she doesn’t want to) and sees fear, rage, pain, and below all that something uncomfortably familiar. This creature is a man in wolves clothing, this is a scared little boy who knows that if he drops the keys to the castle there will be hell to pay. This is a story about a girl looking into a stranger’s eyes and seeing home, she doesn’t always like what she sees.

He turns her horrors back on her, in a voice too soft for Evil he tells her of loneliness and the island. He tells her Han Solo would have disappointed her. As yet, neither of them know that he will never get the chance.

He tries humanity, Rey screams at the injustice. How dare you murder your way into the stories, tear down a castle, capture me and bring me here and have the audacity to be a human? I reject the kindness you have tried so hard to stitch into your eyes, I reject the terror in your heart. I reject your loneliness and your island, because they were never yours to take. I reject everything that binds us, I will not stand it.

She doesn’t know that when Lor San Tekka fell at last to his knees, it was on Kylo Ren’s blade. She doesn’t know that his mind will never entirely leave hers. They are bound by fate and the Force, and one day Finn may join them in that, but for now he must stay the forgotten middle child.

“Don’t be afraid, I feel it too,” he hushes her. But she doesn’t want to feel it, his sympathy is no comfort.

Once upon a time, she fought off Unkar Plutt’s men. Not because she didn’t want their protection, but because she didn’t want his debt. This is not quite the same thing. Everything that Kylo Ren took from Rey, she takes straight back. She grabs hold of the anger that belongs to him and raises it above her head, “You! You’re afraid. That you will never be as strong as Darth Vader!”

He leaves, she’s used to that. She’s going to sit on the sidelines and watch everyone leave, she’s going to breathe deep and pretend she’s not waiting for them all to come back.

When she had reached for the lightsabre in Maz’s castle, Obi Wan Kenobi had been with her. He returns now, flitting down the avenue that the Force has opened up to all the Galaxy within Rey. He is familiar and new, unerringly light. His ghost settles over her, guides her, puts the idea in her head that there is a way out of this prison that does not require her to go through Kylo Ren.

Obi Wan Kenobi was grounded, he never expected anyone else to save him. He doesn’t show Rey the ways of the Force out of mercy, he shows her because that’s what Jedi do. Because her family never left her entirely.

Jedi Mind Tricks – they only work on the weak minded. Here we have an untrained girl, strong enough to match up to one of the most powerful Dark people in the Galaxy, verses a lowly Stormtrooper. That’s no sort of a match. She slips through his guard and takes his weapon, hoping dearly that he will not pay the price and promising herself that she doesn’t care.

There were bodies back on Jakku, fallen soldiers made of metal and stardust. They called them space ships, even once they fell to earth. There had been Star Destroyers like this one, gutted and strangled, their bones laid bare upon the sand. Rey learned to walk amongst the tattered exoskeletons of the empire, she learned how to survive. Every step beyond the door of her cell is premeditated and familiar to her, slipping through corridors and ducts and eventually into the service hatches. Rats and sewers, remember? If you let them in, you have only yourself to blame.

There are thieves and traitors and murderers aboard this vessel. Their names are Chewbacca, Han Solo and Finn respectively. Only they have all stolen and betrayed and killed. They have been out, saving the universe because that’s what heroes do. Finn has come crawling back in search of Rey, because that’s what friends do.

Rey doesn’t have the words to express the emotion threatening to flood the sand out of her lungs and tear her apart. She throws her arms around Finn, pulls him close, feels the beating of his heart and knows he’s real. She had seen home in his eyes, but she hadn’t for a moment imagined that he saw the same thing in her.

Imagine a life time of waiting, waiting for something to come back to you and certain that everything would leave. Imagine for the first time, looking up to see someone running towards you rather than away. Imagine your feet falling on solid earth rather than the rapidly deteriorating sand dunes of your childhood. It's how Anakin felt when he was swept up by Qui Gon Jinn, Padme Amidala and Obi Wan Kenobi. It’s how Luke felt falling into Han Solo and Leia Organa’s arms. After a life time making do, to be given something, something without a price, something that you are not expected to owe or return – it makes you strong. It will turn you to iron. Oh scavenger, who is the Skywalker and not the Skywalker all at once, you are indestructible, you are fire.

There is work to be done. Details fly through the air as they run onto the oscillator, Finn trying his best to explain dying stars and garbage disposal in the same breath. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t. What’s important is this: they are running through the belly of a planet that is also a weapon, had she been paying attention she would have felt it take the lives of everything the New Republic had fought for. If they do not shut it down, it will take the Resistance.

Han stops them, stares them down, looking for a reason to leave. He wants to leave, he wants to run. The next time Finn and Rey see that look in someone’s eyes they will recognise it, but for now they see a hardening resolve. Qui Gon Jinn didn’t know he would die when he lit his sabre and entered the fray against Darth Maul, but he suspected. Obi Wan Kenobi didn’t know he would die on the day he put his faith in Han’s ability to run, but he was ready to.

You don’t last as a smuggler without learning all the old stories. Han knows how this part plays out when he decides to stay, his feet tentatively touching the ground for the first time in almost sixty years. He knows he will die. He doesn’t want to, he wants to run, but sometimes you have to understand that it’s the Galaxy or you, and Han Solo is not worth the Galaxy’s destruction.

“They’re in trouble, we can’t leave,” he says, not looking Chewbacca in the eye. Debts are about to be paid, don’t meet the rich man’s gaze. He’s careful when he passes out the explosives, his fuse almost burned out as it is and Chewie holding a weapon strong enough to take down half an army. He sends Finn and Rey off to complete other, more menial tasks, looking at footprints in the snow, lines in the sand.

Han always hated Tattooine, the way everything was eventually subsumed by the desert. He remembers so little about it except the thrill of his feet leaving the sand behind as they flew off into that twin sunset. Maybe it was beautiful, but he hadn’t cared to look. He slips between the support posts that hold up a machine he doesn’t need to understand to know is Evil, pressing detonators into the wall, hoping against hope that when the axe finally falls, Chewie will be up in the rafters, too far away to stop his inevitable downfall.

You don’t need to feel the Force to see the future, not always. Rey can do both, though, and she feels the shifting tides of history rippling around her as she and Finn scale something so much bigger than themselves, so much smaller than their hearts. She barely notices the wind and the snow, Jakku nights were colder and it’s storms more fierce than anything this world has shown her.

Is it the world, or is it just a scared child, a misguided martyr? Whatever it is, whatever does it, Han looks up and sees something dark and dangerous, something he knows all too well striking out across the abyss. If you were to fall from there, that would be the end of you. But Han Solo doesn’t fall, he only flies. He talks until everyone realises he’s full of shit. Right now, he’s running out of options.

“Ben!”

Rey hears the word fall from Han’s lips and it tugs at something deep in her chest, shifting the sand to expose the last living spinebarrel, something she could have never found by herself. Finn tenses next to her, opening his mouth like he might be about to remind her that Kylo Ren was the stuff of his nightmares too. A terror they can all share in.

He is the monster under the bed, the changeling child, and Han walks out to meet him without fear or caution even as his legs shake, feeling something solid beneath his feet for the first time in years, for the first time since a little boy argued his way out of the Correlian forests and never looked back.

In that time Han has fallen in love half a dozen times, stolen more ships than you can imagine, smuggled drugs from one star to the next, had a son, lost a son, lost his wife, lost his best friend, lost it all. Continued on regardless. When he made the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, everyone had asked him how he did it and he hadn’t known how to explain how easy it was for him to stay in motion. Forget solid ground, he could leave the physical universe behind and never miss it.

There is Light, even in the Darkest of places, that’s just physics. True black only exists in the belly of a blackhole and the only people who can attest to that are long dead. Rey may yet become a Jedi, but she barely knows the Force. She can’t tell which side is winning when Kylo Ren lets himself become a battle ground for the fight, the only fight, Light verses Dark. All she knows is that there are elements of both within him and she can’t act until she knows which one is stronger.

Promises are just words on the wind, drifting through the slipstream of spaceships made good for picking apart and not much else. Han tries his hand at keeping himself grounded, giving weight to words. Something about his son, something about all the things he would do to rid the boy, the man, the legend, from his bondage. He would do anything. He would set himself deep enough into the soil that he could grow roots. It’s all too little, much too late.

The third child forgot he had a father, because the alternative was to remember his parents’ retreating backs as they threw him out into the waiting arms of the Force. Luke Skywalker was always a strong swimmer, he knew how to keep his head about the desert sands, looking out at the Galaxy - he didn’t know how to teach a young boy to do the same. For a moment, Kylo Ren rises above the surface and takes a great lungful of air. The boy, Ben Organa, drowned years ago but this new thing can learn how to live on land, if Han Solo can come down from the sky, who’s to say his son can’t rise out of the ocean?

That would be much too easy. We all know how this one goes. In the great tragedies, to commit patricide is to kill off a part of oneself, the part of ourselves that we hate the most when we look back on our childhoods. You will look in the mirror for the rest of your life and see your parents staring back at you regardless. It’s not your fault, you were just born that way.

Han is closer, more vital than new stars streaking across the Galaxy, the homes Rey will make on a thousand planets before she dies, the open road Finn will find himself on, all the more important to them than the Hosnian system. Sometimes mass destruction doesn’t cut it, you have to see your father figure cut down before you understand how real this war is.

He never had time to disappoint her, to disappoint either of them. He would have done, eventually. Instead they will remember him as someone to be proud of. An incomplete, unfair memorial.

The sun sets, swallowed by the First Order. The red sabre flairs, Han falls to the fire because the earth isn’t strong enough to hold him. Kylo Ren waits for the pieces of his soul to feel whole again and he waits and he waits and he will wait forever. Waiting is like breathing. Rey can feel the sand in his lungs but he doesn’t have a name for it, not yet.

Chewie owed Han everything, a life debt, as his people called it. He looked at the man’s sacrifice and decided he deserved to be the richest thing in the Galaxy. It was easy to forget, they had been together so long. A pair, a package deal. Chewie did the thinking, Han did the talking and liked to think he did the thinking. It wasn’t supposed to be a friendship but something cracked, sharp as the bowcaster’s string pulling taught. Once upon a time there was a planet where everyone always had somewhere else to be, a desert of time, and the Wookiee was left to look after a boy. He stole toy guns from his hands.

The bolt hits home, Kylo Ren stumbles but doesn’t fall. The resistance arrive and it’s time to run, out into the frozen wastes. When the planet starts to crumble they have more immediate things to worry about than what lies at the core of this machine. Rey grabs Finn’s hand and he doesn’t tell her to let go, pulling each other through the snow, through the cold. This place is not a desert but the ground shifts beneath their feet much the same.

Monsters are only monsters because they are faster, sharper, smarter than you. If they could be easily squashed there would be nothing to fear. Children would not quake in their beds at the thought of what might be hiding out in the night. Like Anakin, Rey is quick. Like Luke, Finn is stoic. Like his uncle and his grandfather, Kylo Ren is powerful beyond imagining and the death of a sun is as nothing to the might he wields between his hands. The things he could do, the things he could teach them how to do.

He meets them in the snow. “It’s just us now.”

Three children with no past, fighting for an uncertain and ever shifting future. Kylo Ren disposes of Rey first because he thinks she is the only real danger, he thinks that what makes the two of them the same will make her hard to pin down. In many ways he’s right, but he forgot the middle child. The power sitting in his bones, born of himself and made strong by years of isolation. They are not so different, but Finn will always be better at seeing what makes the two of them the same.

“Traitor!” Kylo Ren calls him, and if that’s what he will be known as Finn will take it. He killed his brothers, he abandoned an Empire. He did it all for the burning Light that he could not squeeze out of himself, he will do it all again for Rey.

Stoic. Like Luke. Battle hardened, like Leia. If you live long enough you see the same eyes in different people, but having never taken the time to look himself in the mirror, Finn doesn’t know that the fearful, impotent rage staring back at him used to be his own. Kylo Ren asks for the lightsabre but that will not stand, it’s not his to take any more than it was Maz Kanata’s to give.

“Come and get it.”

In the old stories, the only thing that can save mankind is a boy with a sword. Those are our stories though, they start in forests and play out in castles and jousting matches. In this universe, Finn tries, oh how he tries, but he is no one’s chosen one. He is a boy who chose himself, who chose Rey, who chose to lay down his blaster and run. The chooser is just as important as the one who is chosen, but they serve very different purposes in the long running history of the Galaxy. This is not Finn’s moment of triumph, not yet.

Finn falls and Kylo Ren is foolish enough to assume that’s all there is to it. The first child hit her head against a tree and fell, the second couldn’t withstand the heat of the desert and he certainly couldn’t withstand the blade of a lightsabre. His grandfather’s weapon lies in the snow, the blade gone cold but Kylo Ren is a creature of heat, of fire. He was born in a freighter ship circling high above the nearest planet that would have him and if you think Han Solo knew nothing about the feel of land beneath his feet then this boy is beyond lost.

You need to set your feet on the ground and call the place you stand your home, you have to fight for it, you have to keep coming back. The Force swells around Kylo Ren and it’s so similar to his own powers that he forgets to look over his shoulder, at the grounded girl making her home in the snow, her back so straight you might think she built herself from scratch. Rey reaches out and the lightsabre comes to her, because it is a piece of long forgotten history, wars lost and won before she was born. The sands of Jakku hid the end of the Empire from her until the wind swept the desert aside.

But she will be the wind, all by herself if necessary. She will fly, and she will always land.

The trees weep sap, fall in on themselves and die as tribute in this fight. This one fight, the only fight, between the Dark and the Light.

Only Kylo Ren isn’t Dark enough to back his corner, and Rey burns so bright with glorious rage that the shadows she casts could tear the planet asunder. Anger leads to hate and hate will make you powerful. That’s true whichever way you slice it, doesn’t matter which order is trying to win you over to their side.

This time, he runs and she advances, striking blows that a child could parry. The lightsabre moves like a quarterstaff that has been stitched out of the air. Kylo Ren dodges and falls back. He looks into her eyes and sees himself and cannot bring his arm up to fight her as she should be fought. She is so strong with the Force! Untrained, but stronger than she knows.

“You need a teacher!” He barks, and he means himself but he knows it could be anyone. It really doesn’t matter, so long as someone finds it in themselves to guide her.

Rey looks into Kylo Ren’s eyes and sees home, the promise of power she knows not. She can feel the heat of the desert pouring off him but he was not born of those sands. His parents came from the greatest forests in the Galaxy and this is not his story. She could show him mercy, but she knows the Dark side is always a choice.

So he falls, and in the end don’t all pawns fall at times like this? Rey scars his face, nearly takes one of those eyes that shine with familiar loneliness right out of his skull.

One less eye to look at, one less face to see in herself. As if the Force itself is moving around her anger, the ground splits and takes the killing blow out of her hands. This story has many more chapters to go before Kylo Ren’s fate is sealed. Why, they are standing in the forest right now. A new story is already beginning, even as the planet collapses in on itself, Chewie flying them away from that horrible place, wailing for the debt that was never paid, the life cut short. The little boy sleeping in his arms while his parents ran off to save the Galaxy.

They return to D’Qar, exhausted and triumphant and Rey doesn’t know how to look at the fields stretching down from the Resistance base. All that green it won’t fit around the sand in her lungs. It feels wrong to even try when Finn is barely drawing breath. Victory should be sweet, but it shudders and flickers when she tries to hold onto it. It feels nothing like light that used to blaze through Lor San Tekka’s stories, on the edge of a town she couldn’t bring herself to think of as home.

Leia wants her to think of the Resistance as her family, and in a way, that’s what it has to be for now. Rey comes back to Finn, day after day, watching him through the glass of the med bay and hoping he understands.

There is only so much time allowed to mourn imperfect victory. There is a map that leads to the Skywalker, and someone must stride out across the stars to find him. There is no question in anyone’s mind as to who should make that trip.

The story is swirling around them, gathering them up and sweeping them along. You might call it destiny, but it is so much more than that. It is the Force and it is choice and it is precedent, set down over thousands of years. Finn couldn’t be a boy with a sword, but it might just be time for a girl with a lightsabre to take the lead.

It feels like leaving Finn behind to climb aboard the Falcon, that ancient freighter that should have fallen apart years ago. What would Unkar Plutt think of this? To see the old girl flying, nothing more than scrap metal and determination. A rat that knows better than any of them how easy it is to lose oneself in the sewers. Leia bids Rey farewell without looking at the ship and Rey understands, but only because she can feel the Force moving through the both of them. Han used to climb aboard the Falcon and disappoint her, time and time again.

And he never got the chance with Rey…he will never have the chance again. Chewie offers her the pilot seat and she swears she will come back to D’Qar, back to the Resistance. She will call this place home because the alternative is unbearable.

The air beneath the Falcon feels alien and light, her hands slip over controls she memorised years before, waiting out sandstorms with the first real friend she ever had. BB8 is still on the ground, but the ship sings for her. It has such stories to tell, battles won and enemies evaded. It has lived, out amongst the stars. Her heart still howls when she thinks of Jakku, the spaceships vanishing into the atmosphere and never coming home to her, but her eyes track the coordinates she must follow to reach Luke and something like destiny tells her to push forward.

Luke Skywalker is a myth, Ahch-To is a legend. The island rises out of the ocean, identical to the one she had seen in Kylo Ren’s mind, to the one he had seen in her.

The path she climbs to the top of the mount is tricky, unforgiving, like the dead body of a starship she has yet to properly explore. The ground beneath her feet feels distant, held above the waves by determination alone. Nothing for her to hold on to. This place will shape her and temper her but it will not be her home. Rey knows, as soon as she steps foot on it, that Luke made a mistake hiding here.

Sometimes you save the Galaxy, sometimes you condemn it. Your best intentions will yield your darkest hours. At the end you come out better for the experience, or if not you, someone will hear tell of what you did and remember not to repeat your mistakes. The Force is so thick here as to be negligible, parting to let her past and blocking out all else. It’s ok, she doesn’t need it. Sometimes the path ahead is so clear you couldn’t step off it if you tried.

There is a man standing at the top of Ahch-To who feels familiar to her. Like a brother, like a student, like a wide eyed boy with too much wonder and not enough caution in his heart, holding out his hands to accept the universe and Rey pauses.

She pauses because she has to, because saving the Galaxy is as much about what you won’t do as what you will.

But Luke has seen the worst parts of his arc play out in vivid detail, he has been broken down and now he waits to rise. He doesn’t know that he waits, but Rey can feel it on the back of his tongue, on the wind pouring off the ocean. She knows all about waiting.

These are her first steps, up towards the summit, waiting for eyes that look nothing like her own to peer out from under the hood, across the years, across the decades she has never lived because they were held in someone else’s hands. Waiting in the desert, waiting for stories to happen but only knowing that you are waiting.

Anakin Skywalker lets his hand slip into Qui Gon Jin’s and the Republic unravels. Rey finds her hand trapped by Finn’s and it unravels again.

Obi Wan offered Luke the universe, now it’s her turn.

Take it, she cries out through the Force, holding out the weapon that would have cleaved Kylo Ren in two for the crime of daring to be human when he had done so much Evil. Take it, fulfil your destiny. Look at the line you have left in the sand, vanished with the years. If you will not look ahead, how can you ask that I do the same?

You can stand on the shoulders of giants, or you can become one. Luke looks at her, right at Rey, he doesn’t care about the weapon he lost on a gas planet she has never visited, has never set foot on, will never make her home because she is grounded.

Rey holds her back straight and hears the ocean winds washing away her past behind her back and exposing new treasures for the taking. This story was forged in the heat of a thousand deserts spanning millions of years. She is just the newest in a line of torch bearers, and that makes her the brightest thing in the Galaxy.

The Skywalker and not the Skywalker track the familiar beats of legend in each other’s veins. The Force is an ocean spread out around them and it is deep but it is oh so wide. You could search its waters for a thousand years and see but a fraction of its beauty.

“It’s time you knew.” Luke tells her.

Rey nods, and her heart explodes into Light.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Mel](https://melamungous.tumblr.com/) for checking this over prior to posting
> 
> If you're at all interested, Rey's backstory in this fic is cobbled together from Before The Awakening, her Wookiepedia entry and my own imagination  
> The Force as an ocean is an idea I got from [this piece of meta](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/post/143833614589/jasjuliet-respainey-jollysunflora), and it's one I'm very fond of. 
> 
> Comments are love. Come find me on [tumblr](http://jeffersonhairpie.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/chadfuture_)


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